The Reluctant White Mage
by sissyHIYAH
Summary: Quistis is ill, Seifer is her nursemaid. He can't decide if he's happy about it or not.


"I've heard that you're supposed to suck down a couple of raw eggs, straight outta the fridge. Replace the protein you've lost through vomiting."  
Quistis had spent the past twenty minutes trying to calculate the volume of her stomach based on the rise in the level of the water versus the hardened calcium ring of the toilet bowl, but each time she thought she had it figured out, her stomach twisted in white-hot knots again.  
"It's not protein you need to...need to worry...electrolytes...dehyd-...dehydration..."  
Seifer grunted and continued his manicure. He had never understood why dirty fingernails were a symbol of masculinity. Rough hands, sure. Calluses and scars and cracked knuckles, all those things that showed a man wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty, those represented fierce animal vitality. But allowing them to _remain_ dirty? Apes digging in termite mounds did that. Real men kept their fucking hands clean.  
He blew the nail dust from his freshly-buffed thumb and, satisfied with the neat edges on all fingers, replaced Quistis' file on the bathroom counter.  
"It's supposed to be like a blow job, except cold. Not that you would know, since you never swallow, but..."  
She was well on her way to becoming an inverted coelomate and he wanted to talk about semen. Typical.  
"Fuck off and die."  
"Tsk, tsk. That isn't very nice."  
Her various lotions smelled exactly like her. She favored herbal scents, lavender and rosemary and mint, nothing too heavy or too obvious. Some women liked to smell like sunlight or daisies or fucking roses. She smelled like the earth. Red clay, iron, blood. Except not. What blood would smell like if coffeehouse poets had their way. That's what she smelled like.  
"You're not..."  
His stomach turned when he glanced over and saw the thick rope of snot dangling from her nose. It wasn't that the slime bothered him, but it looked so out of place coming from her that he wasn't sure what to think about it. The mere suggestion of mucous meant that other fluids were possible, and if fluids were possible, then gases were possible, and if Quistis Goddamed Trepe ever farted, then the world would implode in some cosmic silence that created life on alien planets.  
And fuck some little green men if they thought they could take over his world. They had one hell of another think comin'.  
"Ever try aspirin and hot sauce? Fujin used to swear by it."  
Synapses fired through the haze in her brain, clicking onetwothreefourfivesix like a revolver held underwater. On a good day she would have been able to dissect that old wives' remedy, but it wasn't a good day and she didn't feel like arguing. She shook her head, exasperated past caring if he thought her ignorant.  
"How is that supposed to help?"  
She needed to replace her toothbrush. Seifer had a very nice smile for several very good reasons. One of them was meticulous attention to the tools used to maintain his choppers. How she maintained such a pretty smile with such a mangled set of bristles was beyond his reckoning. It had to be the fancy mouthwash. Pink. Of fucking course it was. The entire world swore by green mint and she would be the bitch to use pink. He wondered what pink might taste like. Bubblegum? Nah. Probably some fancy foreign pigment used to paint frescoes in cathedrals. It probably tasted just like paint.  
"Well, I'm not sure. Then again, Fu used to eat chocolate covered ants. And spicy pepper beetles. Said that she liked the crunch."  
"That's disgusting..."  
The twelve year old boy in his brain couldn't resist the easy prey.  
"Mmm. Exoskeletons. Can't you just imagine picking those from between your teeth? It'd be like the peppercorns from Hell."  
"I..."  
It was almost too easy. "I was at this fucking awesome oyster bar with the posse one time. Raj would slurp up buckets of those things. Pop, crack, slurp. Pop, crack, slurp. Man, you would not believe the noises he would make. It sounded like an old man's wrinkled balls slapping against a fat hooker's ass."  
"I hate you."  
"So he got the oysters and he's slammin' 'em back as hard as he can." Quistis' stomach lurched and gurgled. He thought he could hear it clawing through her belly button to escape its own acidic dungeon. "I don't care very much for raw oysters, so I ordered the boiled shrimp. We were having a few beers, laughing our asses off, just having a blast, right? So I had a few too many beers and didn't peel one of my shrimp quite as well as I should. The fucking shell-tail thing got stuck on the back of my tongue and I started to choke."  
Quistis ran her tongue along her teeth. "Shut up. Do it now."  
"So then Raj starts to laugh at me and I got pissed, but I was choking, right? So I try to tell him to shut up, but I can't say anything because I was being killed my a goddamned homicidal zombie crustacean. So that gets that bastard laughing even harder. The waitress comes over, asks us if everything's okay, but Raj is like, dying by this point. Gasping for air, slapping the table, the whole bit."  
"Urgh..."  
"So I try to tell the waitress that things are peachy fucking keen, but my face was so red that she thought I was allergic to shellfish, so she's screaming for the manager, an old woman at the bar starts crying, then he waddles over and thinks that Raj is the one that's dying..."

Seifer considered offering Quistis a tissue, but decided against it. With her cheek stuck against the porcelain, it would have done nothing but added a film of cheap paper pulp to the mess on her face. Her vanity would never forgive him.  
"And I tried to sling my mug at Raj, but I missed and hit Fu's plate, so she gets pissed and gets up, then fucking drop kicks me between my shoulder blades. The tail goes flying out of my mouth, into the waitress' tray, and Raj laughs so goddamned hard that he had an oyster fly out of his fucking nostril."  
"That's..."  
"Fucking incredible. I know. I took pictures. It looked like a balloon, except more...you know, oyster-y. And gross."  
"No, it's..."  
There was no more food left in her gut. Her pale yellow bile seemed almost apologetic, ashamed that it wasn't as vivid as the contractions and heaving would have had her audience believe it might be. Quistis fumbled along the wall, searching for the toilet paper, but surrendered and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.  
Seifer knew that it was rude to snarl, but with her he wasn't sure what would be thought more offensive-suck it up and act like she didn't have belly butter dripping from her chin, or offer her a hot towel like some oiled-down poolboy on a fancy cruise ship. "Ugh. You look like shit. Remind me to roll you on your side when you pass out so you don't choke on your own puke."  
"Such a fucking gentleman."  
She belched and he looked at the fan in the ceiling, certain that he could hear the whirring of extraterrestrial engines.  
"Again with that word. I've a notion to call the governess of your finishing school and inform her that you're not quite the belle of the ball."  
"I've never claimed to be one."  
"No, but you act like it. At least in public. The shit you make me do when we're fucking makes me wonder if you went to a different sort of school altogether."  
"I've never heard you...you complain."  
"And risk having you deny me..." Vomit splashed on the expensive Trabian ice tiles. "...oh god. Again?"  
"Blarf."  
"Wait. How can you make a noise like that and invent a word that is that noise at the same time? That's some nasty-ass linguistic voodoo."  
"What?" He was fading in and out, but the more he faded out, the angrier she became. What gave him the right to sit there on her bathroom counter and wiggle in and out of existence like some hyper-critical ghost? "I don't know what...what you're...talking...wharf..."  
"You nasty...ugh. Just...here." Her combs were complicated and he had no idea at all how to operate the elastics, so Seifer grabbed her hair and pulled it away from her face. "Empty your belly before I start to hurl too."


End file.
